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Old Toy Modding?
Sqwubbsy writes "Stumbling through Google, looking for info on the Big Trak by Milton Bradley, I came across an article about one that was retrofitted with an OOPic controller. I was wondering if anyone else had a good story about a retrofitted toy that they beefed up?"
My BigTrak was the first thing I ever hacked, I even bough up[ everyone I could from kids in the neighborhood, as well as garage sales etc. I actually built my first robot using parts from a BigTrak, it was much like a Hero and I used a modified Armitron (Which I just bought my son ne just like mine from an antique dealer he loves it)
:)
I never in my like imagined there was anyone else out there who hacked a BigTrak I was about 10 when they came out and it was my dad's idea, he came home after we had discussed buying a Hero Kit to find I had pulled my armitron and BigTrak apart and was mocking up the Body of the robot, another 6 months and we had something nearly as cool as a real Hero, at least to me
Been toying with the idea of modding my old Speak n Spell and Speak n Math to teach my kids basic algebra.
And I've got a friend that's been studying the Teddy Ruxpin story tapes to figure out the hidden signals to control the movements of the bear. His ultimate goal is to have the bear read stories from Penthouse with all face movements synced.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
After a recent story about Meccano (like the Erector set), I did some searching and found numerous sites which had Meccano clocks. One of the sites mentioned a modified escapement to make a Reifler clock, which is one of the most accurate mechanical clocks. If anyone finds any plans or kits to make a clock like this in Meccano, please post links. One of these would make a great addition to my desk.
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Well, you all probably don't want to hear what I...I mean my friend...did to a lifesize barbie doll.
The making of the Falcon...
This guy put a PC in a Falcon... kinda cool.
I took it to school once and my home room teacher had me program it to go across the hall and shoot the laser cannon at the old, old teacher in that room, and then retreat. Everyone had a good laugh about it, but the sad thing is if my son did that today, he'd probably get expelled or be forced to see a shrink.
Too bad some of his links in the story point to documents on his C: drive.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I've picked up three plastic kits of the Jupiter C rocket, Hawk models circa 1958, built two so far and converted them to fly with model rocket engines and recover by parachute.
I fly them from a launch pad made from an Erector Set Rocket Launcher kit with the appropriate additions for the launch rail.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
- Use GPS to determine where it currently is
- Do an A* Search to plan a path to the destination
- Use GPS for navigation
- Use sonar for obstacle avoidance
Negative obstacles are going to be a problem (i.e. holes in the ground , stairs, bottomless pits, etc).If by modding you mean, "blow it up with firecrackers to see what it does."
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
Well I had a story about a blow up doll that I had modified with a two horsepower wet/dry shopvac, but I've been too busy healing up from all of the skin grafts to post it.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I picked up a few for like $10 apiece at walgreens (i'd seen em elsewhere for $40). Had to put a resistor in to lower the volume (they were loud), other than that havn't done much, but there are lots of mods out there, articulated bodies, extra legs etc, all combined with a rudimentary AI for a kickass toy.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
After my washing machine refused to wash my socks one time too many, I decided to rebuild it... http://www.migweb.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=13 1398
yeah, I once "modded" an old GI Joe figure with a "jet pack" strapped to his back (about 3 or 4 regular bottle rockets with fuses twisted together). amazingly enough it DID fly up about 10ft into the air and actually HOVERED there in a relatively fixed position for a few seconds. unfortunately, there was apparently a manufacturer's "defect" which caused the "jet pack" to explode and letters to be sent to next of kin.
I wanted one too, really bad, for Xmas. After opening all my presents, no Big Trak :(. As soon as the stores all opened up after Xmas, I took all my Xmas money and went to Toys R Us and bought one. The whole family watched me navigate an obstacle course in the kitchen, my uncle mumbled something about microprocessor. I think it was soon after that I got an Apple ][e for my birthday. Thanks Dad!
I still have it (the bigtrak, the ][e died), and believe it or not, it's not in a closet or the garage, it's on a shelf in the living room. Damnit, now I have to go find a nine volt!!!
You can get a lot of uC's cheap, but you have to (a) make hardware for them and (b) program in assembler or shell out some big bucks for development environment. Then you spend so much time doing housekeeping code you've lost any interest in the project.
If you want to get into in microcontrollers, the oopic is a great place to start. The oopic (based on the microchip PICMicro chips) has an on-board object oriented programming language based around hardware objects (dc motors, servos, etc). The software is free. You code a few lines up and *bingo* working robotics.
Then after you've used them for a while, you can move up to bigger and more powerful things. Atmel cpus, PICMicros in assembler and C, TINI boards.
(Technical side-note: I believe I had a AC-DC converter involved in this somewhere, but it's been 15 years and I don't remember)
Check out for a basic explanation and introduction to circuit bending.
Banaaaana!
We still use LEGOs to visualize some inverse kinematics before implementing them in a software project I'm in. And a friend once built a gas pedal for his AMIGA joystick using Legos. Unfortunately, you had to be extremely careful not to hit the brake and accelerate at the same time - the machine would immediately crash if you did it :)
This is a running problem with most batteries when operating a motor. Unless the battery is entirely solid state and doesn't decay over time, the voltage it supplies drops as it gets used up. Problem continues to exist today with Lego Mindstorm robots as well. To correct for this, one would want to put a sensor which senses the rotating shaft on the motor -- keep rotating motor until it's gone through the proper amount of degrees instead of just supplying driving voltage for about the right amount of time.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
When I was about 14 I got a Omni Jnr robot from a car boot sale for a few quid. It had tank type steering, a bump sensor on the front, flashing lights, and some preprogrammed bits of speech when you touched various bits.
He would autonomously move round, bump into things, say sorry, then reverse and turn, and do the same thing. You could also put him in remote mode and control him with the ultrasonic handheld control.
After a while, he got boring and expensive, eating all the batteries up. So switches went in to turn off the speaker, and to turn off the flashing eyes. I also put in a switch to turn off his bump sensor, but I can't remember why.
Computer control and remote power was what it needed. A huge length of ribbon cable was obtained from a skip, and I fed power down it, as well as soldering the other wires so that they could use the motor controller inside.
The next few weeks were spent hacking away at my C64 with an old broken cartridge and the user port. Eventually, I got reliable control of the robot... now I had real power.
I didn't really know what I was doing, but was pretty proficient at basic, so I wrote an application to map my house. You would time how long he went until he hit something, then back up, turn left, and do the same. From the time, you could infer distance. It would have worked, bar the fact that the speed changed all the time, and the umbilical cable caused loads of drag. Sometimes it gave reasonable results.
Unfortunately he got binned when my dad cleared out my shed.
Everyone has probably tried to mod an R/C car at some point. You can hook up a 9.6V battery to a 6V car and get some extra speed (R/C overclocking!), for instance. I've replaced a ton of motors in my life, but nothing really satisfied my need for an ultra fast car, until I saw something in Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart sells huge R/C Hummer H2s. If you've seen them, you'll know what I mean. They're probably 2.5 feet long.
I bought one and ripped out the interior, then modded in a 1.5 hp gas motor from an old grass trimmer. 1.5 hp is plenty quick enough for a toy. Besides fitting the motor to turn the wheels (only the back... couldn't get 4WD working because the motor covered the cog that turns all 4 wheels) the hardest part was getting the R/C's throttle to work the gas motor's throttle, but after a little tweaking and super glue it worked pretty good. The gas tank from the trimmer went in the very back of the truck.
I'm sure plenty of you are into R/C cars. I'm actually not and have never built one before, so I don't know how powerful those motors are. They can't possibly be 1.5 hp or be anywhere near as powerful as this trimmer motor because the truck was completely undrivable. Full throttle from a standing start would turn the back wheels so fast the truck would flip onto its back. Easing it up to full speed would send the truck going well past the 60km/h speed limit on the main street near me. The truck couldn't turn at that speed because it would immediately flip about three dozen times. The truck stopped working after my first high speed turn after the jarring flips broke the body and knocked some of the mechanical parts loose. It broke forever on my second day playing with it after the cogs connecting the motor to the wheels broke. I could replace them with parts from a hobby store, but it's almost more fun to look at the broken truck knowing I modded it into destruction.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
In the early nineties, Mattel had an infamous Barbie doll that told girls gems like "Math is hard. ..giggle.." Some activists broke into a warehouse and swapped boards between the GI-Joes and Barbies so that the Barbies were saying things like "Stop Cobra!".
http://ifaq.wap.org/posters/barbiedir.pdf
I'm sure many (most? all?) of us at one time or another have modded the packages the toys came in. My favorite package mod is the tennis ball cannon. I long thought this was something every kid had done since it was so common in my neighborhood, but I've since learned many children did not create recreational explosive devices, so I'll briefly explain the cannon.
Materials: can of tennis balls (the old metal kind), lighter fluid.
Tools needed: can opener, matches.
Procedure: 1) Open the can of balls in the usual manner. 2) Using a "triangle punch" style can opener puncture a hole in the SIDE of the can at the closed end. 3) Make a small dent in the can about 3 inches from the closed end so that a tennis ball dropped in the open end will lodge inside and leave an open volume at the base of the can. 4) Set the can closed end down on the ground making sure the open end is not pointing in the direction of anything you might miss if impacted by a tennis ball projectile. 5) Squirt some lighter fluid into the can through the triangular puncture at the base. 6) Light a match and touch it to the puncture hole and FOOOOM! Out comes the ball at an impressively high velocity.
This endeavor always degenerates into a game of burning tennis ball soccer. The balls soak up lighter fluid nicely and continue to burn for a good long while. This game is played on a road with cars parked along it to serve as obstacles under which you do not want the flaming ball to go, but under which the flaming ball does eventually end up resulting in children running away screaming to hide. The car never seems to explode like on TV however.
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www.smithtwins.com
In the future, busses will lift passengers up into the sky for no really good reason.
Here you can find some links. They are not all toy moding, some are toy destruction but you have between others:
How See 'n Says Work;
How to make a talking fish say what you want;
And of course Scientific analysis of the destruction of a toy Chibi Moon figure.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
When I was 5-years-old, my aunt bought me one of those dorky remote control cars that goes forward except when you press the remote control, making it turn backwards and to the right.
Well, being bought at Big Lots, it breaks almost immedietely and leaves me with my first of many derelict cars.
My father, being an insane, genius, electrical engineer (do they make them any other way?), decides that the thing to do is make it into a complete remote control car. So the first things he does is orders a MOSFET speed control kit from RC/Modeler (back in the days when electric speed controls were awesome AND expensive). And he hands me a soldering iron, a schematic, a preprinted circuit board, and sets me to putting it all together.
Fast-forward one year: I'm playing with my brand new remote control car! It runs over anything and teaches me a very valuable lesson about things coming at you turning right when you move the stick left!
I've still got that car. 20 years later and it rolls just fine with a fresh NiCad charge. And I'm a mechanical engineer. Coincidence?
1. You
2. My mother
3. ???
4. Profit!
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
I used infrared LED's and sensors as eyes. By pulsing the LED's and reading the sensors when both on and off, I was able to filter out background noise. When the truck approaches an obstacle it knows something is there and will swerve or stop and back up if the obstacle registers on both its left and right front. Like this, the truck can drive around continuously on its own. But not for long cause it sucks down batteries like you wouldn't believe, worse on plush carpet but not so much on hardwood flooring.
I've also modded a different RC monster to carry a wireless video+audio camera. It moves too fast to drive indoors. It is interesting to drive around the yard while sitting at my dining room table watching the monitor. I would like to add a radio circuit to carry my voice. Imagine the neighbors kids reaction if a little truck drives up to them and says 'Hey you little hooligans, get the heck out off my lawn!'
I severely modded a gasoline powered golf cart into a robot back in the early 1980s. The first incarnation used four Apple II computers. I stripped all the mechanicals--brakes, steering, throttle, trans--and replaced them with DC motors. Everything was computerized.
/.?
Being a golf cart, it was big enough for two people. I added ultra-sonic detection, IR and various control systems for remote operation. I'm a radio ham so my first camera system for teleoperation used amateur TV on 440Mhz. Fun to drive remotely!
Teleoperation and autonomous roving is cool but the most fun is being *in* the vehicle and driving it via a camera system and laptop. It's a tremendous challenge be in a vehicle and to drive it around a course while looking at a computer screen. Much more difficult than any computer or vid game.
I've been 'playing' with the machine for years and finally figured out a way to make money with it: I turned it into a game. See robot pics here: http://aicommand.com/pictures.htm
My next venture is a total mod of my ultra-light and fly it from on the ground. See the pics and note the computer company name on the wings: http://www.aicommand.com/ultrlite.htm
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Ah, Now I understand. This is an over simplification. A cell voltage will decrease as it becomes discharged. However, if this were the reason motors did not get the same ammout of power at time A as they did at time B then it could be easily fixed with electronics.
A battery can be moddled as voltage source with an internal resistance in series. As a battery discharges this resistance increses.
While this is not 100% accurate (As cell voltage does change too.) It models the important fact that A cells capacity to provide current decreases with time and while a cells voltage may go from 1.2v (full) to 1.0v (dead) (for NiCad) the internal resistance will change much more dramatically over the life span of the battery.
The reason I did not say what can be done is that it is very hard to do. Typically what is done is there is some other system on board that tells the robot where to go. For example, you may have a couple of photocells "looking" for a light source or a vision system. These systems provide feed back that does not say "turn 90 deg" but rather "keep turning your not there yet".
MEMS accelerometers are not very good for measuring change in distance. The output is at best +/- 1mg which does not sound so bad but when you have to take the double integral to got position you'll soon realize that error accumulates very fast. Your latter suggestion would probably work well but would be a pain to implement. I don't think I've seen many people do what you suggest.
One thing I have seen work relatively well is hacking two optical mice to watch the floor. Two are needed to detect rotation as well as displacement.
That would still give you problems on different surfaces, which affect the degrees turned per unit time or whatever very substantially, due to slip between the wheel and the carpet. The only way of doing it properly, I think, is to install a compass or equivalent.
The only sensors I have that are useful for this are the infra red radar trick, and a parking radar kit which has more range but eats batteries and is rather ugly.
In my case, at every search (when looking for paths by spinning round), if it finds 1 feature in roughly 360 degrees I use that to set the effective turn time step. I could add some sort of pattern matching algorithm for more complex cases, but life is too short.
Anyway, after buying a couple of those swords, (one for me and another for a friend, so we could have saber battles), I concluded that I didn't like the way the sound effects worked. So I spent a couple of days rebuilding. I took the sound-guts from another toy and rigged the saber so that there were now two extra buttons within easy reach of your finger; One, when pressed, would make a, 'deflected blaster bolt' sound, and another which made a nice, 'Waving the Saber' sound; --all over top the basic saber hum.
It worked really well, and I lucked out with the parts I had available and the way in which they were designed. All I needed was basic electronics knowledge to make it all work.
The finished product made shadow fighting very dramatic; you could now match up the sounds the saber made exactly with what you were doing with it. Very cool! Now the saber toy was something which was actually worth the twenty-five bucks or whatever I paid for it. --Strangely, I can't remember the last time a toy was made which included the sensible features any normal kid would want.
The plastic for the blade could have been made better. See-thru green, (it was Luke's saber from Jedi), wasn't the best choice. It should have been more opaque so that the light bulb could do its job in illuminating the blade. But whatever. --I also drew up designs which would allow for the blade to retract entirely into the hilt, (another stupid feature of the toy was the ten inches of exposed blade when it was retracted. Lame.) Making it work properly could be done if you dropped the battery size down to two AA's, but it would have required molding my own plastic parts, which I wasn't going to do.
There seems to be a law; "No Toy Is Allowed To Be Completely Cool. There Must Be Some Suckage Involved."
Ah well. Like most things in life, I had way more fun modding the thing than I would have if it had arrived perfectly realized into my hands from the package.
-FL